Tech pioneers give their history a home
Mountain View, Calif., soon will offer technology enthusiasts something they can’t see anywhere else: an original copy of Apple Computer’s first business plan.
There’s also a prototype for an Apple code-named Cadillac that never made it to market, a 1982 PC called a Commodore 64, and wooden wagon wheels that once graced a bar popular among Silicon Valley engineers.
The objects are among 22,000 housed in the Computer History Museum, whose mission is to chart the evolution of computer technology. The museum, in a two-story former headquarters of Silicon Graphics on U.S. 101, is backed by pioneers including Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs.
“The old machines represent where we, those of us in the computer field, came from,” said Wozniak, 57. “They tell a story of amazing inventions even when the inventors had no idea what it would lead to.”
Wozniak said he plans to donate his most valuable artifact, a 150-page notebook with his handwritten code for the Apple II computer. He and other tech luminaries are giving money as well to help preserve the legacy of their young industry that revolutionized the world.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and former Netscape Communications technology chief Eric Hahn each donated at least $10 million, as did Palm Inc. co-founder Donna Dubinsky and her husband, Len Shustek. Other contributors include EBay founder Pierre Omidyar and venture capitalist John Doerr, an early backer of Google.
The museum displays some of the earliest personal computers, including an Apple I and IBM’s failed PC Junior. It has an Altair 8800 from Micro Instrumentation & Telemetry Systems, the machine that inspired Gates and Paul Allen to write the software that led to their founding of Microsoft in 1975.
Reaching back further, there is a 1935 Enigma machine used by the Nazis to encrypt messages during World War II and one of the 40 panels that made up the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. The 1946 Eniac, the first programmable digital computer, ran calculations for the hydrogen bomb and operated until 1955, when it was struck by lightning.
Some donors must be convinced that equipment and ephemera such as manuals, software and sales brochures are worth saving. In August 2006, curators raced to a warehouse in a small German village to rescue forerunners of modern computers that were destined for the dump.
“People don’t view it as historic because it’s all happened in the past 50 years,” said Dubinsky, a member of the museum’s board. “We have this incredible opportunity to collect things today to help future scholars understand what happened -- why it was important -- and we can do it while many of the protagonists are still around.”
“Every object is pregnant with politics and meaning far beyond the technical,” said Dag Spicer, senior curator.
The museum grew out of the collection of Gordon Bell, a Microsoft senior researcher, and his wife, Gwen. It was displayed in Boston starting in 1979 before a plan emerged to create a nonprofit center in California.
In 2002, the group bought a building down the road from Microsoft’s California campus and Google’s headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley, 35 miles south of San Francisco. The museum, which opened in 2003, attracted more than 40,000 visitors last year and has a $4.1 million annual budget.
